A Different Breed: Deputy Ray Cook Started His Career Long Before Sheriff Joe Arpaio Was Invented

On Maricopa County sheriff's Deputy Roy Cook's last day on duty, a colleague said of him, "Too bad. He was just starting to figure out the job."

Yeah, after 44 years as a lawman, which apparently makes Deputy Cook the longest tenured of any Maricopa County employee on record.

Having been assigned to the county court complex for about a quarter-century to provide security, the guy who wore badge number 115 was about to call it quits at age 67.

Paul Rubin

Roy Cook, on his last day on the job, December 30, at the county courthouse.

Cook stood in the lobby of the Central Court building on East Jefferson Street in downtown Phoenix. Being the week after Christmas meant that foot traffic was slow, "a yawner," he called it.

But work is work, and Cook was determined to make his last day as normal as possible before retiring to a life of ski trips and hanging out with friends.

These were unusual times, he conceded, what with his publicity-hound boss, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the current county attorney, Andrew Thomas, conducting a political blitzkrieg against the local judiciary — a branch of government that Cook has come to deeply respect.

But Cook didn't want to talk much about Arpaio, brushing off questions with a wry smile and a tellingly slow, sad shake of the head.

"You think Joe Arpaio is powerful?" he finally allowed. "You should have been around here when I started."

That would have been March 1967, a month before Jimi Hendrix torched his guitar for the first time on stage, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands of Vietnam War protesters down State Street in Chicago.

Cook, who was 23 at the time, didn't know from Hendrix and King. He was a self-described "pretty simple kid" who had graduated from Phoenix Union High School in 1960 and was working construction when police work became a possibility.

Cook grew up near 16th Street and Camelback, which was then open desert and where his father ran a gas station.

He was a young man who liked, he says with a grin that suggests understatement, "to have a real good time."

"But I wanted a permanent job, and it was sitting right there," Cook says. "It was different then. No police academy, no polygraphs, just a little background check, a physical check, an oral board, and off to work you went."

Deputies at the time worked at the pleasure of powerful Sheriff Luther "Cal" Boies, who swayed many an election by using employees as campaign workers during his tenure from 1946-68.

Part of his unwritten job description was to put up campaign signs for selected candidates, knock on doors in uniform (a decidedly cowboy look back then), and collect signatures from local residents.

It wasn't just Sheriff Boies — who had to run for re-election every two years — for whom Cook hustled political support.

"We had to canvass for judges, too, as long as they were Democrats," he recalls. "It wasn't exactly police work, but whatever."

Phoenix police asked the MCSO during Cook's first year as a deputy to assist in quelling growing racial tensions in neighborhoods near Van Buren Street east of downtown.

Cook says he and other deputies were ordered to march through the streets in a show of force: "They put us rookies in the front, and the sheriff told us, 'If it gets down to it, we want only one story — yours.' In other words, shoot 'em dead. I was scared shitless, but we all made it."

MCSO deputies ran the county jail, downtown on First Avenue. New officers could be stuck there for years because deputies out on the road usually stayed there until retirement.

"I could have gone out to Gila Bend, but no one wanted to work that far away," Cook says. "So I stayed at the jail for quite awhile. I think I was the only one of my original group [of deputies] to make it even 10 years."

Then, as now, working corrections could be fraught with peril, and a manic inmate once stabbed Cook in the eye with a pencil.

"There was blood everywhere, almost lost the eye," Cook says. "The other deputy kicked the shit out of the guy, who wound up in court a few days later and wanted to show the judge his bruises. Didn't work out so well for him. I was back on the job real quick. That's how it went back then."

Cook was something of a rebel at times. His supervisor ordered him to the graveyard shift for a stretch for refusing to trim his long, thick mustache. But the deputy held his ground.

Cook finally got an opportunity at regular patrol duty after several years. His stint began — almost literally — with a bang.

"We got into a high-speed pursuit," Cook says. "It was my very first hour on patrol. We are alongside the car, and my sergeant is yelling at me on the radio, 'Take him out! Shoot him!' I've got my gun stuck out of my window, but I'm not about to shoot. I mean, come on. Eventually, the guy pulls over and surrenders without a problem.

I want to reach Roy Cook. I am an old high school girlfriend who hasn't seen or heard from Roy Cook since our days together at Phoenix Union High School. I have been on and off searching for him through these past years. I congratulate him on his retirement. I too have retired, in Salt Lake City. I was a dance professor for years after I left Phoenix. I so fondly remember how lovely Roy was to me.Patti